Fortunately for the Jews of those times—says a writer—their civilization was by far superior to that of the Christians. The rabbi, though in no way inferior to the priest mentally, was immeasurably above him morally. The students of the yeshibot, despite their exclusive devotion to the study of the Talmud, yet were better equipped for intellectual work, were of broader minds and better manners, than the pupils of the Jesuits. And the Jewish ba'ale battim, with an education as good as that of the Gentile shlyakhta, had a more ennobling and elevating object in life.[6]
It is remarkable how quickly they recuperated from the blows they received. In 1648 thousands of people were killed, whole communities exterminated, Volhynia, Podolia, and a great part of Lithuania utterly ruined. In 1660, in those very places, we hear again of Jewish settlements, with synagogues and schools and a system of education of the kind described in the preceding chapter, and we hear of the Council of Lithuania struggling to re-establish and cement the shattered foundation of their self-government. Yet all their efforts improved the demoralized condition of the country but little. As always in national crises, the individual was sacrificed to the community, and deprived of the few rights remaining to him. The kehillot became brutally oppressive. There were no longer men of the stamp of Abraham Rapoport, Solomon Luria, Mordecai Jaffe, and Meïr Katz, to put their feet on the neck of tyranny. Without special permission no one could buy or sell, or move from one place to another, or learn a trade or practice a profession. Rabbinism became synonymous with rigorism, the coercion of untold customs became unbearable, and the spirit of Judaism was lost in a heap of innumerable rites. The Jew's every act had to be sanctioned by religion. He knew of the outward world only from the heavy taxes he paid in order to be allowed to exist, and from the bloody riots with which his people was frequently visited.
What could result from such a state of affairs but poverty, material and spiritual, with all the suffering it engenders? Those at the head of the kehillot, being responsible solely to the Government, often had to deliver the full tale of bricks like the Jewish overseers in Egypt, though no straw was given to them. On one occasion Rabbi Mikel of Shkud was arrested because the kahal could not pay the thousand gulden it owed. In 1767, the whole kahal of Vilna went to Warsaw to protest against intolerable taxation. Such protests were usually of little avail. On the other hand, a few powerful families throve at the expense of their oppressed coreligionists. This aroused a spirit of animosity and a clamor for the abolition of the kahal institution. Jewish autonomy was more and more encroached upon. Rabbinates were bought and sold, and the aid of the Government was invoked in religious controversies. A question regarding the preferable form of prayer was submitted to the decision of Paul I. In 1777, Prince Radziwill decided who should officiate as rabbi in so important a centre of Judaism as Vilna,[7] and in 1804 the Government issued a "regulation" depriving the kahal of its judicial functions altogether.
What was even more disastrous was the spiritual poverty of the masses. Seldom have the awful warnings of the great lawgiver been fulfilled so literally as during the eighteenth century:
And upon them that remain of you, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the land of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall, when none pursueth. And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies (Lev. 26: 36-37).
But the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind. And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and thou shalt have none assurance of thy life (Deut. 29: 65-66).
Having learned from sad experience that there was no crime their foes were incapable of perpetrating, they gave credence to every rumor as to an established fact. A report that boys and girls were to be prohibited from marrying before a certain age resulted in behalot (panics), during which children of the tenderest ages were united as husband and wife (1754, 1764, 1793). Mysticism became rampant. "Messiah" after "Messiah" "revealed" himself as the one promised to redeem Israel from all his troubles. Love of God began to be tinged with fear of the devil, and incantations to take the place of religious belief. The Zohar and works full of superstition, such as the Kab ha-Yashar, Midrash Talpiyot, and Nishmat Hayyim, the first studied by men, the others by both sexes, but mostly by women, prepared their minds for all sorts of mongrel beliefs. "In no land," says Tobias Cohn, "is the practice of summoning up devils and spirits by means of the Cabbalistic abracadabra so prevalent, and the belief in dreams and visions so strong, as in Poland."[8] All this, though it strengthened religious fervor in some, undermined it in others. Sects came into being, struggled, and, having brought added misery upon their followers, disappeared. Jewish criminals escaped justice by invoking the power of the Catholic priesthood and promising to become converted to Christianity.[9] And now and then even Talmudists left the fold, as, for instance, Carl Anton, the Courland pupil of Eybeschütz, who became professor of Hebrew at Hamsted, and wrote numerous works on Judaism. Others hoped to win the favor of the Gentiles by preaching a mixture of Judaism and Catholicism. In many places, especially in the Ukraine, the seat of learning that had suffered most from the ravages of the Cossacks, the state of morals sank very low, owing to the teaching of Jacob Querido, the self-proclaimed son of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbataï Zebi, "that the sinfulness of the world can be overcome only by a super-abundance of sin." This paved the way for the last of the long list of Messiahs, Jacob (Yankev Leibovich) Frank of Podolia. His experiences, adventures, and hairbreadth escapes, his entire career, beginning with his return from his travels in Turkey, through his conversion to Catholicism (1759), to the day of his death as "Baron von Offenbach," would furnish material for a stirring drama. As if to counteract this demoralizing tendency, a new sect, known as Hasidim, originating in Lithuania and headed by Judah Hasid of Dubno and Hayyim Malak, taught its devotees to hasten the advent of the Messiah by doing penance for the sins of Israel. They were so firmly convinced of the efficacy of fasts and prayers that they went to Jerusalem by hundreds to witness the impending redemption (ab. 1706). But the ascetic Hasidim and the epicurean Frankists were alike doomed to disappear or to be swallowed up by a new Hasidism, combining the teachings and aspirations of both, the sect founded by Israel Baal Shem, or Besht (ab. 1698-1759), and fully developed by Bar of Meseritz and Jacob Joseph of Polonnoy.
Isaac Bär Levinsohn, 1788-1860
Time was when all writers on the subject, usually Maskilim, thought it their duty to cast a stone at Hasidism. They described it as a Chinese wall shutting the Jews in and shutting the world out. It is becoming more and more plainly recognized and admitted, that it was, in reality, an attempt at reform rendered imperative by the tyranny of the kahal, the rigorism of the rabbis, the superciliousness of the learned classes, and the superstition of the masses. Its aim was to bring about a deep psychologic improvement, to change not so much the belief as the believer. It insisted on purity rather than profundity of thought. Unable to remove the galling yoke, it gave strength to its wearers by prohibiting sadness and asceticism, and emphasizing joy and fellowship as important elements in the fabric of its theology.